The First Film Is a Battleground Feature: Television Is Rarely a Battleground
I’ve been away, in Slough and California; forgoing cinema for The Office Christmas Special and the first season of The O.C. The former is a rare example of television as art. The latter demonstrates my weakness for the pleasures of episodic television.
The argument for The Office, The Larry Sanders Show, and Freaks and Geeks as art can be made unequivocally. All three shows were the product of a consistently distinct, collaborative sensibility that oversaw their entire runs. Their characters were recognizably human, their pains and pleasures specifically real. All three shows, in their best moments, were simultaneously unpleasant and irresistible
One must qualify the argument for Twin Peaks as most of the second season functions as a perverse shell game, but taken as a whole (including FIRE WALK WITH ME), it’s unquestionably art, simultaneously a celebration of imagination’s creative possibilities and a devastating portrayal of the destructive power of abuse.
I’d argue to create a distinct category, the sublime, to cover the excellence of Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Simpsons, and The Kids in the Hall. The volume and (varied) nature of the work allows for wild swings of quality, but all three efforts functioned at a high level overall, and, at their respective peaks represented an enlightening, rigorous perspective on both life and art.
I’m not going to discuss The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire right now as they’re all unfinished, thus difficult for me to categorize (which speaks to their quality and the benefit of both producing fewer episodes and (more or less) not having to make them until you’re ready). Had I been writing Film Is a Battleground at the time, I would have reviewed Walter Hill’s Deadwood pilot. After ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, BEFORE SUNSET, and SON FRERE, it’s the best piece of filmmaking I’ve seen this year. And it’s Walter Hill. I have some thoughts regarding his body of work.
The nature of American network television conspires against success. Should one create a good show, be fortunate enough to gain the network’s support, and find a large, receptive audience, one will then be forced to produce so many episodes that the quality of the writing will inevitably suffer. Still, I continue to watch shows even as I recognize the declining quality of the episodes because of a fondness for certain actors. As the scripts demonstrate less rigor and are further removed from the story originally set out to be told, actors are forced to do less acting and more performing. If you’re going to watch television, and twenty-seven years of evidence says that I am, the general level of work is so poor that I’m willing to accept this trade-off from once-compelling shows. Up to a point.
I still contend that David Duchovny is a latter-day Elliott Gould (more on how serious a compliment I consider that in both an upcoming review of CALIFORNIA SPLIT (now on DVD) and a feature about THE LONG GOODBYE and McCABE AND MRS. MILLER), but The X-Files, like NYPD Blue before it, quickly abandoned the story it set out to tell and became unwatchable. The respective lessons learned: 1) paranoia and obsession are intriguing, aliens are boring and dumb; 2) the moral struggle of police work is engaging, a generic soap opera’s panoply of affairs, births, deaths, and crises that happen for no good reason to, let’s say, cops, not so much.
Gilmore Girls suffered a similar descent from a charming, involving character piece to an under-cast, unambitious version of LA RONDE (or Reigen if your particular bent is a little more literary/theatrical). For those who would claim that an intimate knowledge of the 100+ episodes of this series to be a bit femme-y, I counter with the argument that beautiful, funny women have been an underutilized resource since the studio era and present the careers of Kathryn Harrold, Annette O’Toole, Debra Winger, and Karen Allen as my first exhibits.
The high school episodes of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer constitute a beautiful allegory for adolescence and even as the show struggled to find a reason to exist from that point forward, it still provided a bit of termite art with the musical episode, “Once More with Feeling,” a joyous, homemade effort in the spirit of THE BAND WAGON.
The Jacobean allegories of Oz were pointedly socio-political in nature. The series’ prevalent male nudity garnered a lot of media attention which overlooked the relentless examination of race, religion, sex, and gender. Thematically, Oz shares a lot with Deadwood, which is similarly discussed in terms of its vulgarity rather than its content.
Of the good, recent cop shows, Homicide: Life on the Streets was easily the best, though it too eventually fell victim to the compromises necessary to stay on the air. Charles Dutton and David Simon’s six-episode series, The Corner, first offered a glimpse as to what Homicide might have been like without network interference. Simon’s The Wire is doing so now on a grander scale, but lacks anything quite like the complicated relationship between Detectives Frank Pembleton and Tim Bayliss. Andre Braugher and Kyle Secor gave the finest collaborative performances of the nineties this side of Sean Penn and Kevin Spacey in HURLYBURLY.
In the last couple of weeks, I watched all thirty episodes of The O.C. Seeing the first thirteen episodes again made it clear that the show has degenerated into a homoerotic buddy comedy (still kind of amusing), interrupted by rapidly accelerating plot twists (annoying), and a reliance on pre-emptive, reflexive jokes acknowledging the show’s purposelessness (recognizable as that which killed The Simpsons).
A year ago, Josh Schwartz could get away with claiming to want to make a show like Freaks and Geeks, but being realistic about what he could get on the air he had to smuggle those elements under the guise of offering the heir to 90210’s cheap throne. Adam Brody, Peter Gallagher, and Rachel Bilson demonstrated they were talented enough to carry that weight. Unfortunately, they are no longer asked to. If Schwartz still harbors such ambitions, he’s hiding them in the show’s darkest recesses forcing his actors to rely on their charm and the audience’s vanishing reservoir of goodwill.
Freaks and Geeks was so great, and its follow-up Undeclared so modest and skillful, that I think that Judd Apatow might be able to succeed in an open-ended network environment longer than anyone else. The fate of those shows makes it likely we’ll never know for sure. And I must acknowledge that even the best network sitcoms of the last twenty years, Cheers, Frasier, NewsRadio, and potentially Arrested Development, despite the wealth of talent in front of and behind the cameras ultimately reveal more about the mechanics of comedy than they do about life.
I can’t muster even a qualified defense of why a big part of each weekday during my unemployment consisted of watching two hours of Dawson’s Creek (a show I actively dislike and would describe as unwatchable were it not for the fact that I’ve seen every single episode (and the one where Pacey and Joey get locked in a K-Mart together many, many times), except to say that by about 2015, Joshua Jackson will be widely recognized as the new George Clooney rather than the new, just as criminally underutilized Patrick Dempsey.
I presume that it’s my struggle to create narrative which draws me inexorably toward its unadorned form. My sensibility is episodic, not in the sense of the rigid act structure employed by the shows mentioned above, but rather as a collection of incidents I hope add up to something. Similarly, I believe the transience of my developmental years explains some of my passion for James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, and James Lee Burke. To know and evoke a specific place so clearly appeals to me to the same degree it is beyond me. So I set things in impermanent locales: motels, bars, diners, and parking garages and chase the narrative dragon in the safety of my home from Sunnydale High to McKinley High; Deadwood to Baltimore; Orange County to Star’s Hollow; Hollywood to Slough.
Click here to read the full post with comments
The argument for The Office, The Larry Sanders Show, and Freaks and Geeks as art can be made unequivocally. All three shows were the product of a consistently distinct, collaborative sensibility that oversaw their entire runs. Their characters were recognizably human, their pains and pleasures specifically real. All three shows, in their best moments, were simultaneously unpleasant and irresistible
One must qualify the argument for Twin Peaks as most of the second season functions as a perverse shell game, but taken as a whole (including FIRE WALK WITH ME), it’s unquestionably art, simultaneously a celebration of imagination’s creative possibilities and a devastating portrayal of the destructive power of abuse.
I’d argue to create a distinct category, the sublime, to cover the excellence of Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Simpsons, and The Kids in the Hall. The volume and (varied) nature of the work allows for wild swings of quality, but all three efforts functioned at a high level overall, and, at their respective peaks represented an enlightening, rigorous perspective on both life and art.
I’m not going to discuss The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire right now as they’re all unfinished, thus difficult for me to categorize (which speaks to their quality and the benefit of both producing fewer episodes and (more or less) not having to make them until you’re ready). Had I been writing Film Is a Battleground at the time, I would have reviewed Walter Hill’s Deadwood pilot. After ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, BEFORE SUNSET, and SON FRERE, it’s the best piece of filmmaking I’ve seen this year. And it’s Walter Hill. I have some thoughts regarding his body of work.
The nature of American network television conspires against success. Should one create a good show, be fortunate enough to gain the network’s support, and find a large, receptive audience, one will then be forced to produce so many episodes that the quality of the writing will inevitably suffer. Still, I continue to watch shows even as I recognize the declining quality of the episodes because of a fondness for certain actors. As the scripts demonstrate less rigor and are further removed from the story originally set out to be told, actors are forced to do less acting and more performing. If you’re going to watch television, and twenty-seven years of evidence says that I am, the general level of work is so poor that I’m willing to accept this trade-off from once-compelling shows. Up to a point.
I still contend that David Duchovny is a latter-day Elliott Gould (more on how serious a compliment I consider that in both an upcoming review of CALIFORNIA SPLIT (now on DVD) and a feature about THE LONG GOODBYE and McCABE AND MRS. MILLER), but The X-Files, like NYPD Blue before it, quickly abandoned the story it set out to tell and became unwatchable. The respective lessons learned: 1) paranoia and obsession are intriguing, aliens are boring and dumb; 2) the moral struggle of police work is engaging, a generic soap opera’s panoply of affairs, births, deaths, and crises that happen for no good reason to, let’s say, cops, not so much.
Gilmore Girls suffered a similar descent from a charming, involving character piece to an under-cast, unambitious version of LA RONDE (or Reigen if your particular bent is a little more literary/theatrical). For those who would claim that an intimate knowledge of the 100+ episodes of this series to be a bit femme-y, I counter with the argument that beautiful, funny women have been an underutilized resource since the studio era and present the careers of Kathryn Harrold, Annette O’Toole, Debra Winger, and Karen Allen as my first exhibits.
The high school episodes of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer constitute a beautiful allegory for adolescence and even as the show struggled to find a reason to exist from that point forward, it still provided a bit of termite art with the musical episode, “Once More with Feeling,” a joyous, homemade effort in the spirit of THE BAND WAGON.
The Jacobean allegories of Oz were pointedly socio-political in nature. The series’ prevalent male nudity garnered a lot of media attention which overlooked the relentless examination of race, religion, sex, and gender. Thematically, Oz shares a lot with Deadwood, which is similarly discussed in terms of its vulgarity rather than its content.
Of the good, recent cop shows, Homicide: Life on the Streets was easily the best, though it too eventually fell victim to the compromises necessary to stay on the air. Charles Dutton and David Simon’s six-episode series, The Corner, first offered a glimpse as to what Homicide might have been like without network interference. Simon’s The Wire is doing so now on a grander scale, but lacks anything quite like the complicated relationship between Detectives Frank Pembleton and Tim Bayliss. Andre Braugher and Kyle Secor gave the finest collaborative performances of the nineties this side of Sean Penn and Kevin Spacey in HURLYBURLY.
In the last couple of weeks, I watched all thirty episodes of The O.C. Seeing the first thirteen episodes again made it clear that the show has degenerated into a homoerotic buddy comedy (still kind of amusing), interrupted by rapidly accelerating plot twists (annoying), and a reliance on pre-emptive, reflexive jokes acknowledging the show’s purposelessness (recognizable as that which killed The Simpsons).
A year ago, Josh Schwartz could get away with claiming to want to make a show like Freaks and Geeks, but being realistic about what he could get on the air he had to smuggle those elements under the guise of offering the heir to 90210’s cheap throne. Adam Brody, Peter Gallagher, and Rachel Bilson demonstrated they were talented enough to carry that weight. Unfortunately, they are no longer asked to. If Schwartz still harbors such ambitions, he’s hiding them in the show’s darkest recesses forcing his actors to rely on their charm and the audience’s vanishing reservoir of goodwill.
Freaks and Geeks was so great, and its follow-up Undeclared so modest and skillful, that I think that Judd Apatow might be able to succeed in an open-ended network environment longer than anyone else. The fate of those shows makes it likely we’ll never know for sure. And I must acknowledge that even the best network sitcoms of the last twenty years, Cheers, Frasier, NewsRadio, and potentially Arrested Development, despite the wealth of talent in front of and behind the cameras ultimately reveal more about the mechanics of comedy than they do about life.
I can’t muster even a qualified defense of why a big part of each weekday during my unemployment consisted of watching two hours of Dawson’s Creek (a show I actively dislike and would describe as unwatchable were it not for the fact that I’ve seen every single episode (and the one where Pacey and Joey get locked in a K-Mart together many, many times), except to say that by about 2015, Joshua Jackson will be widely recognized as the new George Clooney rather than the new, just as criminally underutilized Patrick Dempsey.
I presume that it’s my struggle to create narrative which draws me inexorably toward its unadorned form. My sensibility is episodic, not in the sense of the rigid act structure employed by the shows mentioned above, but rather as a collection of incidents I hope add up to something. Similarly, I believe the transience of my developmental years explains some of my passion for James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, and James Lee Burke. To know and evoke a specific place so clearly appeals to me to the same degree it is beyond me. So I set things in impermanent locales: motels, bars, diners, and parking garages and chase the narrative dragon in the safety of my home from Sunnydale High to McKinley High; Deadwood to Baltimore; Orange County to Star’s Hollow; Hollywood to Slough.
Labels: television
Click here to read the full post with comments
posted by Bret LaGree at 13:12
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